Hospitality
is a human universal. It has been taken up by the philosopher Jacques Derrida,
projecting this institution of all human cultures, onto the scale of humanity
itself. But as it is performed in practice, hospitality is a strikingly
ambivalent institution. I shall explore the particular ambivalence of
hospitality to gods and ghosts in contemporary China. From there I will give
the example of a remarkable Vietnamese hospitality to the ghosts of hostile
strangers and ask whether, as the ethnography by Heonik Kwon suggests, it could
stand as an exemplar of international relations or of universalised
hospitality. The commemoration (or disavowal) of mass deaths as historical
events is contrasted to the individuation of what were anonymous ghosts, leaving
us with a conundrum for everyday and necessarily local ethics and clashes
between different universalisations of empathy with suffering.